George Pusenkoff
Allianz Versicherung
Cologne

Unlike many younger artists who use the computer as an extension of traditional atelier tools, George Pusenkoff studied computer sciences (in Moscow) before beginning his art studies. A few years after completing his degree in fine arts he moved to Cologne, where he rapidly established himself as one of the most gifted representatives of a new, digital sensibility.

While many of his contemporaries suppress the zigzag configurations of electronic images, Pusenkoff has long used the pixel as a structural tool and esthetic marker that he applies to all sorts of painterly investigations. He scans into the computer such works as Kazimir Malevich's Black Square and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing to produce pixilated studies, then meticulously transfers the digital image onto canvas, complete with the task frame.

Pusenkoff mostly uses square formats that suggest a continuation of the painting-is-dead dialogue introduced by Malevich's famous all-black canvas. But they also constitute a reprise of Josef Albers's "Homage to the Square" series, now given a sprightly interior rhythm through the quadratic pixel structures. Despite the electronically derived from, a palette reduced to primary colors and black, and a flat painting technique, the works are far from anonymous. As though by electronic sleight-of-hand, Pusenkoff has succeeded in creating a form-language that is distinctly his own, while allowing each recycled source—from Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue to Leonardo's Mono Lisa—to assert its own individuality. Pusenkoff reveals and dramatizes an inner pictorial reality that recalls—perhaps not unintentionally Malevich's concept of a "fourth dimension" in painting. (In June, Pusenkoff also showed at Galerie Ernst Hilger in Vienna.)

—David Galloway

ELECTRONS FLOATING SOMEWHERE
by Mark Robertson
1999, Photoshop 5.01, iMac Rev C2 (You're using photoshop 3.05 George - get with it) 6.5"x5.75"

Of course, it is obvious that all of that art mumbo-jumbo is blown out of the water by Mark Robertson's appropriation of George Pusenkoff's appropriation of Mark Robertson's pixelation style of the mid-1980's. Anyway, just who is this Mono Lisa chick?

Ronald Davis
REVIEW WITH PIXELATED ELECTRONS FLOATING SOMEWHERE, 1999
Photoshop 5.02, jpeg document, Power Macintosh G3 Beige/466
609 x 522 pixels